For years, televisions have been a staple of consumer electronics sales. As such, a large majority of households in the United States owns at least one television. Providing content to those televisions is a lucrative business and there are numerous types of television content to choose from. For example, viewers can subscribe to digital broadband television networks and digital satellite television networks in order to receive standard digital television content or high definition television content via a broadband connection or a satellite connection. In addition, many companies now offer digital video recorders (DVRs) that can be incorporated into standard set top boxes. A DVR can be used to record digital television content transmitted to the set top box.
Many service providers also offer streaming video content and pre-cache video content in order to provide a user with content that is tailored to his or her needs or tastes. Unfortunately, streaming video content systems and pre-cache video content systems have limitations. For example, in a streaming video content system, the set top box builds up a buffer of the streaming video before video content can be displayed. The buffer is provided in order to account for variations in the download performance of the network. Depending on the available bandwidth and the level at which the content is encoded, the caching phase of the streaming video content can take more than several hours.
With pre-cache video content systems, video files are stored in their entirety on the set top box in anticipation of a user wishing to download one or more of the video files. A pre-cache video content system eliminates the wait, but due to the relatively large sizes of the video files, only a limited number of movies can be pre-cached on the set top box, e.g., five to fifteen video files. As such, if a customer is not interested in one or more of the pre-cached video files, he or she must wait for the entire video file to be downloaded.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system and method for pre-caching video files on a set top box.